Carlo Fiore

Carlo Fiore was an actor who now is remembered only for his friendship with Marlon Brando, the man many cineastes feel was the greatest movie actor of all time. In New York City during the 1940s, Fiore was a fellow student of Brando's at Erwin Piscator's acting workshop at The New School. Fiore briefly roomed with Brando in the early, pre-fame days and became, arguably, his closest friend other than Wally Cox. Unlike Cox, Fiore was minimally talented and his involvement in the industry was entirely due to his being a hanger-on of Brando's. As a hanger-on, his presence sometimes troubled others, notably Stanley Kubrick, who had been hired by Brando to direct a movie version of "The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones," the novel that was the basis for the movie One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Kubrick eventually was fired, Brando directed the film himself, and Fiore was given the credit "assistant to the producer." Though he manged movie gigs until the mid-1960s, it never really got any better than that for Fiore, career-wise. Kubrick and his partner James Harris, during the development of Lolita (1962), hired Fiore to write a screenplay of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Kamera obskura," which Fiore had optioned himself. (Written in Russian in 1932, "Kamera obskura" was first translated into English circa 1938 as "Camera Obscura" and again circa 1960 as "Laughter in the Dark.") The book had elements in common with "Lolita," and Kubrick -- who was worried he was being hustled when Fiore approached him with the rights to the novel -- tied up the production of a potential rival film by hiring Fiore. Nothing came of Fiore's foray into film development, although Tony Richardson later made a movie of the novel with Nicol Williamson starring.) What Fiore essentially did was hang-out on film sets with Brando and carouse with him after-hours. Fiore claimed credit for inspiring the great actor in one of cinema's most famous scenes. In "Bud: The Brando I Knew," Fiore's 1974 memoir of his friendship with America's greatest actor, he claimed that he was on the set of "On the Waterfront" (1954) when Brando was troubled with the "I coulda been a contender" dialog between his character Terry Malloy, and his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger). Brando was dissatisfied with the scene, as written by Budd Schulberg (who went on to win the Oscar for his "On the Waterfront" screenplay), feeling that the idea that one brother would pull a gun on another was bogus. (Brando, one of three children, grew up in a household with two sisters, so he allegedly did not understand the conflicts between brothers, according to Fiore. Actually, 'Bud' Brando had been close to Wally Cox since childhood and considered him his brother.) Fiore claims that it was he himself who came up with the key idea behind the scene, which is that Terry feels disbelief and disappointment with his brother rather than fear. (That this is a natural projection of Brando's own disbelief and disappointment with the scene is not glossed on.) No other source, not Brando's autobiography or that by director Elia Kazan, mentions any input by Fiore. Most likely, it was an intuition of Brando's that Kazan helped develop. By the time this dubious claim appeared, after Brando had rocketed back to superstar status after 10 years as "box office poison" in the greatest comeback in Hollywood history, Fiore and Brando had been out of touch for over half a decade, having talked but once on the telephone in that period. Their friendship was ended by Brando due to his battles with his ex-wife Anna Kashfi over the custody of his son, Christian Brando. Kashfi was one of those people who distrusted Fiore, who was a substance abuser. Fiore was an on-and-off again heroin addict, and it was felt by Brando's lawyers that continuing the friendship with Fiore would give Kashfi legal grounds to bolster her ongoing attempts to sever Brando's visitation rights to his son. Like Fiore, Kashfi's psychic world revolved around Brando, even after the bonds holding them together were broken. When asked about Fiore in the late 1970s, Brando replied that his friends don't write books about him. Brando said that Fiore probably wrote his book because that's all he had left. Most of Fiore's stories as recounted in "Bud: The Brando I Knew" have been ignored by subsequent biographers, either because they are under the impression that Fiore was an unreliable source and had juiced up his "memories" for the sake of 30 pieces of silver, or because the stories he recounted were just too salacious. Many of Fiore's anecdotes have a sexual angle and some contain a homo-erotic sub-context. One is left with the impression that Fiore operated as a procurer for Brando as many of the women Fiore associated with were prostitutes. The lack of decency and the preponderance of bad taste the book is likely one reason that Fiore's memoir has never been reissued. It is best forgotten, just as Carlo Fiore has been forgotten, by posterity and - while he was still alive - by the man who knew him best, Marlon Brando.